Struggling to write a book report on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart?Writing
a difficult book report on African literature in general? Achebe's Things Fall
Apart derives its title from a line from William Butler Yeats’
poem "The Second Coming," which foretells the end of the
world. And Achebe’s novel indeed foreshadows the
end of a world: the
incursion of the white man into the society of the African
Ibo, and
the subsequent dissolution of the indigenous culture. The image of
things falling apart is an extremely apt one, for we learn that from
the author’s point of view, Ibo culture is held together by one
string -- its own traditions. This string will not break, but when
pulled it will unravel, causing everything it holds together to
literally fall apart..